Quick! Find a Pole!

Photo by Jack GouldWe'd like to take a moment to give a tip to the vagina girl at Liquid Lounge (ne Geckos Mission Viejo) on Friday: cover it up, sweetie pie. Sure, your silver bikini top, ass shorts and boots were cute, and you have a killer bod, but the slow grind on the pedestal just makes all the girls on the dance floor mock you by doing a dance in which they bend backward and point to their pudendae. And since you're up on that pedestal being a go-go girl, you've got a clear view of the mockers and the apers, and that's gotta hurt. So take a page from your go-go girlfriends, who, instead of pretending to writhe on an invisible face, were actually dancing and had the grace to occasionally adjust their microminis when they rode uncomfortably high. Nobody—well, except for those guys who elected to sit directly beneath your love canal—likes a showoff, so leave the air humping (you know, like air guitar, but better-paying) to the experts at Captain Creem. Of course, we're a terrible hypocrite: if George from the Boom Boom Room had been up on a pedestal, swinging his vine all over the place, we would have been sitting right under his ass, waiting for him to turn that Colgate smile on us. We love George.

Liquid Lounge has transformed itself from a slightly geeky South County kid hangout (which we loved, and where there were often gratifyingly large numbers of people of color hanging out) into a slightly swingin' bachelor pad, courtesy of a bunch of leopard-print couches. Apparently leopard-print, like that wacky goatee and soul-patch thing, will never end. But let's get back to the eye candy, eh? You don't need it to attract guys: they'll be lurking there in sullen, silent packs, anyway, neither approaching girls to chat nor dancing—except for those special few who'll be 86ed as nuisances for rubbing themselves on hapless bystanders like perverts on a crowded subway. And the go-go babes just piss off the other girls, who can't begin to compare themselves to the hipless sugarplums in their cool platform boots; they have a hard enough time getting any attention (and drinks: Whatever happened to buying a broad a nice, refreshing beverage?) from the deaf mutes clumped alongside—but not on; no, sir—the dance floor.

Despite the all-female pep squad (how about some equal time, management?), there are still a couple of wonderful holdovers from the Geckos days: Steve-o, the friendliest man in the universe, is still tending bar by the front door, tossing glasses and catching them behind his back, just like Tom Cruise and Bryan Brown in Cocktail—”This bar's not big enough for the both of us, kid”—except sometimes he drops them. And there's still that fun little catwalk on which strippers-in-training (quick! Find a pole!) can squat, hang their tongues out, touch themselves up and down their chassis, and hope that someday—someday!—all that lovely meth can be theirs, theirs, THEIRS!

We're pretty sure the only reason Roger Butow and friends decided to form an environmental group is so they could smirk about the acronym—Cleanup Aliso Creek Association—though it only works if you decide arbitrarily but pragmatically to make “cleanup” one word. A lovely party—5 Artists 4 CACA—attracted Laguna luminaries like painter Jorg Dubin to the gorgeous canyon home of Merritt McKeon to eat some gnarly sun-dried-tomato-and-pesto dip. Dubin, who's working for Ace Ventura:When Nature Calls' Steve Oedekerk (not LA comic Steve Odenkirk nor Mr. Show's Bob Odenkirk) as an art director, just finished Thumb Wars, which is like Star Wars if Star Wars had thumbs instead of people and Wookiees. Perhaps you saw it on UPN the night before Episode I opened? No? Oh, well. According to our sources—which would be Dubin—Oedekerk has just reached an agreement to do four more thumb pictures for Fox. Thumbtanic, anyone? We're king of the world! Also at the party were a bunch of gorgeously dressed blondes and quite a bit of plastic surgery, but we didn't mean to say it so loudly right as a very lovely woman was walking up; we didn't see her until it was already—and at El Toro International Airport-level decibels—out of our mouth. We didn't mean you! Although you did have a suspiciously good nose. Sorry!

We grooved our way across the county to another rustic canyon: Brea's Carbon Canyon, which even smells different from the rest of the concrete paradise we call home. Or do we call it “maize”? Trailer Park Productions' Psychobilly 500 at La Vida Roadhouse was calling our name, or rather screaming it really loud and really fast. We just missed the Groovy Rednecks, but hell, we've seen them before (they're rednecks, and they're groovy, and lead singer Tex looks just like last issue's cover hillbilly). We did get to see Los Creepers, which consists of drums, bass and two shouters. They were cool. And loud. And La Vida's outside stage seems to be planted in front of a whole bunch of corn, which is odd. And there are palm trees. And cute little rocka/psychobilly kids. And the brother of Chris Gaffney's washboard player. So everyone was happy. And Miss Kittykatand Co. will be putting on an after party at the time-capsule roadhouse after the Hootenanny on July 3. Will our personal friend Dave Alvin be there? She's pretty sure: he's definitely invited, along with Jimmy Intveld and all those other people (and this year, we'll get in if it kills us; no more Van Halen at Glen Helen for us—no, sir; yuck!), so she doesn't see why not.

Hey! Why not come see Commie Girl and Victor D. Infante do an extra-special poetry reading on Monday? See the Readings listings in Calendar. Or e-mail some of your very own poems to Co**********@ho*****.com">Co**********@ho*****.com. She's really not a very good poet.